I sometimes model myself as having sub-agent, and find this perspective very helpful for self therapy. On the other hand, I don't believe that I literally have individual independent sub agents in my brain, because agent architecture is actually complicated.

I like Steve Byrnes mind model, because it's an actual plausible model for how a real world agentic mind might work. It's also the only such model I know about.

Steve's model is not a multi agent model, and I can't think of a multi agent model that works.

Can I explain my own and others sub-agent experiences within Steve's model. I think I can. I have a few different explanations for different types of sub-agent experience.

Gendelin's Focusing:
This practice is at least sub-agent agent. My experience is that one part of me is trying to query another part of me.

My current model for what's happening:

1) There is something peripheral in my mind's context, that the though assessor reacts to. Typically it's something I have potentially strong emotions about, except in the moment, the thing is very low salience to me so I end up having low salience emotions. I might notice something feels off, but I can't tell why, because the though assessor does not explain it's judgments, that's not how it works. So to find out what is bothering me, I can examine various hypotheses, by increasing their salience in my mind, and see how my though assessor reacts. The way I notice these reactions is via emotional shifts.

Internal Double Crux:
For this I will start by quoting part of the Valence sequence

1.5.1 “Valence” (as I’m using the term) is a property of a thought—not a situation, nor activity, nor course-of-action, etc.

For example, suppose I have “mixed feelings” about going to the gym. What does that mean? In all likelihood, it means:

• If I think about going to the gym in a certain way—if I pay attention to certain aspects of it, if I think about it using certain analogies / frames-of-reference, etc.—then that thought is appealing (positive valence);
• If I think about going to the gym in a different way, then that thought is unappealing (negative valence).

For example, maybe the first thought is something like “I will go to the gym, thus following through on my New Year’s Resolution” and the second thought is something like “I will go to the loud and cold and smelly gym”.

So the action of “going to the gym” does not have a well-defined valence. But each individual thought does have a well-defined valence.

This is a pretty text-book IDC situation.

What is going on here is that you have two clusters of associations of the gym that are colored with different valence. Because valance itself is relevant for associations in our mind (we associate similar things, and "good thins" are different from "bad things") if the two perspectives have different valance that can be a barrier for integration, causing two different association clusters which are "pro gym" and "anti gym". If these perspectives gets developed enough, it can feel like two different persons inside you with different beliefs.

In the practice of IDC we hold these perspective up to each other, and letting the valence flow both way across the association, until it reaches some balance. Now, instead of being in two minds over the gym, you're just feeling kind of ok with going, or something like that.

Dealing with ego-dystonic emotions:
Let's say I'm angry at my partner. It would be good to understand why I'm angry and sort it out. But I don't like being angry at my partner. They are great and I love them, and the though that I'm angry at them is very aversive, and therefor hard to think, which makes it hard to resolve what ever is going on. However the though "there is a part of me that is angry at my partner" is less aversive. I can tolerate that though. And now can actually investigate and adress the underlying problem.

I think this is a very large part of the usefulness of multi agent of mind. It lets me avoid both denying my emotion, and also avoid fully owning up to it. It's a great trick. And it's not even wrong. It is true that I am feeling that anger. It's also true that that anger is not everything I am, or everything I'm feeling.

The bit where I autapomorphies the anger is not loadbearing, but it's also not harmfull.

Self sabotage:
I don't have much experience with this, and it's not much in the rationalist discourse. But it's an application of multi-agent of mind theory that I've seen elsewhere. It goes something like this: There is a secret part of you that for some reason (different models have different explanations here) is trying to make you fail. There is an active intelligence, in your mind, optimizing against you.

What I think is going on is that the though assessor have (for some reason) ended up labeling "...and then I'll succeed" as aversive (Steve calls this negative valence, but I think aversive is a better term). What this means thetically is that your mind will expel any plan your believe will lead to you actually succeeding, so you'll only think of plans, or feel positively about executing plans, that will not let you succeed.

This is can potentially be very hard to notice.

The book Existential Kink recommends that if you notice that you are self sabotaging, you should just accept that you actually want to fail, and engage with this kink, and enjoy it, until you get it out of your system. Why would this work?

It's very hard to rid your brain of aversions, since you're avoiding them, you don't get training data that your aversions are wrong. You can do exposure therapy for some experiences that are easy to produce, but if you're avoiding success it might be have to just generate some success to see that it's not to bad. So instead you flip it around and focus on failure is good, and then you can maybe notice that that's not true...

This explanation isn't the best, but I think there is something here about getting around the avoidance, and possibly also about getting around an ego-dystonic barrier.